Editorial: We were right to dismiss Dublin's shared island unit five years ago

Five years ago the then Irish prime minister Micheal Martin launched his government’s ‘shared island’ unit.

​The new department was part of a political coalition deal between his party Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Greens, months after an election in the Republic resulted in Sinn Fein getting almost a quarter of the vote but nonetheless being shut out of power by the other main parties.

Unionists have reason to be grateful that the big Irish parties still want to do this, given the greening in sentiment south of the border. Happily, in the first general election after that 2020 contest – held late last year – Sinn Fein’s share of the vote fell markedly, by more than 5%.

Mr Martin is a scathing critic of the Provisional movement, and a real foe of IRA terror. His supporters said the shared island unit was a bid to outwit Sinn Fein. We said back in October 2020 that unionists should nonetheless have nothing to do with the unit. We noted that Irish generosity towards shared infrastructure is welcome in Belfast, but pointed out that there are always forces trying to dilute UK sovereignty. In fact, we under-estimated how significantly Irish funding for projects in NI would be pushed since then, with the clear implication that it is the Republic – not the UK – which is generous in the province. And the forces trying to dilute UK sovereignty have been working over-time. Things are even worse than we said.

Now, ridiculously, the shared island unit has produced a report that unionists are rightly dismissing as propaganda, in its claims that life in the Republic is better than in Northern Ireland in almost every way. The campaign for an all island is now a cross-party one in Dublin, helped by a wider Irish establishment. Mr Martin is not in charge of the shared island unit – he has many other demands on his time. Now that unit is part of a nationalist push. How right we were to urge unionists to ignore it.